The Cookie Law and WordPress

Having posted my take on the Cookie Law over at Birds on the Blog I thought it about time I suggested a plugin or two for us WordPress users to install and to cover our behinds comply with the law.

As WordPress users we are lucky. This EU directed Cookie Law (pdf) is now in place (you’ll have spotted requests and notices on more and more websites you visit) and there are some simple solutions available for WordPress that only require a few simple steps, making us perhaps not compliant to the EU letter, but certainly meeting the ICO’s (our UK authority on such things) guidelines on the matter – and they’re the ones that count (well, for those of us in the UK, that is – apologies to our readers beyond Europe for whom this is only an issue if you sell to an EU member country).

So – firstly – do you have any cookies running on your website? Visit CookieCert’s website for a free cookie audit if you’re not sure.

Then you should prepare a page outlining your privacy policy and what the cookies on your site are doing. For instance, our page includes that we only use cookies to help us understand more about the visitors to our website – visitor statistics and analysis, basically. Nothing fancy, just plain English and clear.

Now you need to make it clear that you have a cookie page and privacy policy. While adding yet more plugins may not be ideal, for now it’s going to get you doing the right thing. There are several to choose from and we first tried CookieCert’s consent widget – very simple, no-nonsense or faffing about.

However, I’d prefer to be able to re-word the text though, to be honest…

And so then we worked through a number of plugins – most of them seemed to be ideal, simple, clear and adaptable, however with a good half a dozen we found conflicts with other plugins. And as is the way when looking for the ideal plugin for your WordPress blog and/or website, we kept testing…

The above, provided by the EU Cookie Directive plugin, is the result so far (well I hope you saw the request at the top there – if not that drawing board beckons once more!). I’d prefer something more discreet, and it bothers me that the developers don’t seem to be using it themselves, however this works and I can edit the styling to better suit the site – for now I’m leaving it as is so that you can see what you get “out of the box” so to speak. As we, as visitors and surfers, become used to seeing such requests, we’ll not take much notice and “keep calm and carry on”. The point of the law is to protect our privacy and while it may be an excessive approach, the point is taken by most of us to make our policy clear and accessible.

I’ll review this all regularly as Europe and those who sell to us get used to having such additions on our websites and as we get used to seeing them everywhere. The important thing is to keep it simple and not have continued calls to Accept – that just gets irritating so we do need to be sure of the solution we use.

What have you put in place so far? Or are you going to leave it and hope only the big boys get caught? And can you see our notice at the top there? Is it too much, or just right, or irritating in the extreme? What do you think of it all?

With any luck the rest of the world will have the sense to be more realistic if such legislations are considered. This one really has been ridiculous and it is literally only in the past week or two that ICO have put forward their more realistic guidelines – ones that we can actually work with and adhere to.

My understanding (and I will check this for you) is that websites that need to have visitors’ information stored – those that sell things – are not required to have the opt-in. So for you just having the information obviously available will more than take care of complying. I will read the guidelines again though to double-check.

I like the plugin you’ve used here, Babs – I like the look of it and it’s great that it doesn’t appear on every page. Click once and you’re done.

I still haven’t put anything on my site – partly because I haven’t been sure what to use, and partly because a lot of my traffic comes from outside the EU and I’m a bit concerned that these visitors might not entirely understand what it’s all about and that they might be put off from using the site as a result.

I really have no choice though so I’m just going to have to go for it and see if it affects traffic.

I do think that if you have a very clearly obvious policy page, you’ll be fine. It is useful that more of the big sites are complying now, though whether it will in time have people wondering why all sites don’t have something so obvious in place, I don’t know.

I’ve not noticed a difference in traffic so far (apart from upwards but that’s because I’ve been lax in my blogging 😉 )

This is excellent. I'm not the only one that wants/needs to blog frequently, for various reasons, but just don't find/make the time. Yoast's Caroline gives us some sensible pointers. ... See MoreSee Less